Station Honoring Deportees Defaced

A train station near the French capital that had just been dedicated to the memory of Jews who perished in the Holocaust has been defaced with swastikas.

Residents of the Paris suburb of Bobigny recently decided to dedicate a plaque to the memory of the 22, 400 Jews who were deported from the local train station to the Nazi death camps in Eastern Europe during World War II.

The Bobigny train station was used after Allied bombings destroyed the nearby Drancy terminal in 1943.

Dedication ceremonies for the plaque took place last week with some 1,000 people attending. But within a few days, the walls of the now-unused train station were covered with swastikas.

George Valbon, mayor of Bobigny, asked the police to do their best to arrest and bring to trial those who painted the swastikas. He lashed out against Holocaust deniers. Recently, Holocaust-denial material was put in the mailboxes of all the residents of one of Paris’s boroughs.